bqn-libs VS PDP_11_Simulator

Languages with multidimensional arrays (APL, BQN, J, but not K) have trouble with dicts because an index into an array is a list of numbers, and an index into a dict is an arbitrary value. Many primitives, and especially selection, are designed around lists of numbers and don't transfer to dicts. In K, where the index into a list is one number, there's still a requirement that the keys in a dict all have the same level of nesting, but this isn't bad in practice. BQN will eventually have hashmaps implemented as in a more mainstream/conventional way, as objects. There's a model at https://github.com/mlochbaum/bqn-libs/blob/master/hashmap.bq... .

I don't think studying the compiler is a very good way to learn BQN, but I would like to write up parts of it (limited by time and motivation of course). I did some chat sessions on this sort of compilation during early development; see the links at the bottom of https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/ .

I can offer you the contrary opinion: why I would not use these kind of languages.

A couple of years ago I worked on a non-trivial APL application with one of my university professors and another student. We were trying to build a CPU simulator flexible enough to handle stuff ranging from PDP-11 up to Intel x86. The goal was to run some analysis on memory accesses performed by the x86 architecture. Quite an interesting project in which I worked on for around two year.

The code is still available if you're interested: https://github.com/emlautarom1/PDP_11_Simulator

The first implementation was done in APL using a book which I don't remember as reference. We had a couple of meetings where we learned APL and the general idea behind the design. Pretty soon we started to deal with a lot of issues like:

- We only found two implementations for the APL interpreter: GNU and Dyalog. GNU is free but pretty much abandoned. Support for Windows was (is?) nonexistent. Dyalogs version is proprietary so we couldn't use that (even when a "student" version was available).